90 Quotes by Charles Kettering
Charles Kettering, an American inventor and engineer, made remarkable contributions to the fields of automotive engineering and industrial research. Born in 1876, Kettering held over 140 patents, and his inventive spirit revolutionized various industries during the early 20th century. He is most renowned for his work at General Motors, where he developed the electric starter for automobiles, eliminating the need for dangerous hand-cranking and making cars more accessible to the general public.
This innovation played a pivotal role in the widespread adoption of automobiles and transformed transportation worldwide. Additionally, Kettering's research and inventions extended to areas like refrigeration, aviation, and medical devices. He was a pioneer in automotive research and advocated for fuel additives to prevent engine knocking, which eventually led to the creation of leaded gasoline.
Beyond his technical contributions, Kettering was also a visionary leader, co-founding the research organization DELCO (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company) to further innovation and collaboration among scientists and engineers. His inventive spirit and dedication to practical problem-solving have left an enduring legacy, shaping the trajectory of technological advancement and improving countless aspects of modern life.
Charles Kettering Quotes
Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.
You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.
High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.
An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.
Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.
A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.
The only time you mustn't fail is the last time you try.
You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere.
here is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.
One fails forward toward success.
If you're doing something the same way you have been doing it for ten years, the chances are you are doing it wrong.
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
99 percent of success is built on failure.
The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
I am not interested in the past. I am interested in the future, for that is where I expect to spend the rest of my life.
Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.
Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress.
Every father should remember one day his son will follow his example, not his advice.
My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.
Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.
People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they're exactly like the old ones.
Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.
It doesn't matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try and fail, and fail to try again.
There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.
The opportunities in this world are as great as we have the imagination to see them... but we never get that view from the bottom of the nest.
All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules; otherwise we would never have anything new.
An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.
If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time.
We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.
Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.
The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.
The difference between intelligence and an education is this: that intelligence will make a good living for you, but education won't do much for you at all.
Research means that you don't know, but are willing to find out.
Modern psychology teaches that experience is not merely the best teacher, but the only possible teacher.. There is no war between theory and practice. The most valuable experience demands both, and the theory should supplement the practice and not precede it.
We must look forward to the future as that is where most of us will be spending the rest of our lives.
We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better because we will spend the rest of our lives there.
What I believe is that, by proper effort, we make the future almost anything we want to make it.
Failures, repeated failures, are sign-posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't want to fail is the last time you try something (and it works).
If I have had any success, it's due to luck, but I notice the harder I work, the luckier I get.
If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.
Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.
It is the 'follow through' that makes the great difference between ultimate success and failure, because it is so easy to stop.
I expect to spend the rest of my life in the future, so I want to be reasonably sure of what kind of future it's going to be. That is my reason for planning.
Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence.
A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.
You can send a message around the world in one-fifth of a second, yet it may take years for it to get from the outside of a man's head to the inside.
Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.
Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.
We suffer not from overproduction but from undercalculation. You have heard of technocracy. I wish I had those fellows for my competitors. I'd like to take the automobile it is said they predicted could be made now that would last fifty years. Even if never used, this automobile would not be worth anything except to a junkman in ten years, because of the changes in men's tastes and ideas. This desire for change is an inherent quality in human nature, so that the present generation must not try to crystallize the needs of the future ones.
The price of progress is trouble.
The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
In America we can say what we think, and even if we can't think, we can say it anyhow.
I've never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.
Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.
Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.
It is man's destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence and, as a byproduct of his wonderment, to create a new life on this earth.
Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there.
If a fellow wants to be nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mailman to somebody on his behalf.
The whole fun of living is trying to make something better.
The person who doesn't know something can't be done will often find a way to go ahead and do it.
This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved.
A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.
I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.
Learn how to fail intelligently.
It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.
People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people.
If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.
The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good.
It is easy to build a philosophy - it doesn't have to run
Research is an organized method for keeping you reasonably dissatisfied with what you have.
In many ways ideas are more important than people - they are much more permanent.
You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them.
Research is industrial prospecting. The oil prospectors use every scientific means to find new paying wells. Oil is found by each one of a number of methods. My own group of men are prospecting in a different field, using every possible scientific means. We believe there are still things left to be discovered. We have only stumbled upon a few barrels of physical laws from the great pool of knowledge. Some day we are going to hit a gusher.
The sure ways to create new ventures of discovery are to keep an open mind.
you must take the problem as it is, and let it be what it wants to be.
And there is the point exactly, we are all the time blaming difficulties on to something else. Our real trouble is that we are too soft to solve the problem.
Industry prospers when it offers people articles which they want more than they want anything they now have. The fact is that people never buy what they need. They buy what they want.
The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, required blood and sweat and tears.
We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things; there is no downcurve in science.
The simplest way to assure sales is to keep changing the product the market for new things is indefinitely elastic. One of the fundamental purposes of advertising, styling, and research is to foster a healthy dissatisfaction.
We have been measuring too much in terms of the dollar. What we should do is think in terms of useful materials-things that will be of value to us in our daily life.
Education is man's going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty. Where there is an open mind there will always be a frontier.
People see the wrongness in an idea much quicker that the rightness.
Do not bring me your successes; they weaken me. Bring me your problems; they strengthen me.
Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don't get as much government as we pay for.
There has never been any 30-hour week for men who had anything to do.
We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.
Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to desire the new product enough to buy it to replace the one he has.
A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.
― Charles Kettering Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
